Book Review

Supporting business needs and aligning IT with business strategy are important issues that seem to be at the top of every CIO's agenda. One of the ways to do this is to have a world class IT infrastructure.

Kern, who at one time was the CIO at Sun Microsystems, defines infrastructure as everything used in IT to support the business including the people, processes, and organization. While he was CIO at Sun, Kern was ordered to "get rid of the mainframes" and replace them with Sun gear. That experience set him on the road of discovering what it takes to build reliabile, highly available client-server systems. Good information for anyone building web services as well.

The book is more than just Kern's musings; its built on top of site evaulations to over 40 Fortune-1000 companies. The advice is based on the results of those vists and the problems that those organizations have in common.